Dead Space 3 is nearly upon us, but everyone wanting to pick it up for the PC should have an idea of what to expect. The PC version of Dead Space 3 is essentially a straight port of the console version and lacks any optimizations other PC ports offer. Executive producer Steve Papoutsis defended Visceral Games' decision to not include any DirectX 11 features or high-resolution textures, among others.

It's confusing to me that this question even comes up. It's by no means any less important to us; it gets a lot of attention. The PC is a very different platform. As developers, you want to deliver an experience that's as similar as possible on different platforms.

While having the same experience for everyone is a good thing in terms of gameplay, visually it can be a little lacking. Both previous Dead Space games had options for better shadows and anti-aliasing on the PC, which added to the game's atmosphere. Dead Space 3 should follow suit in that regard, but with other studios, including EA, going above and beyond a straight PC port, Visceral's decision is a little odd.

Papoutsis also had the following to say further in the interview:

In Dead Space 2, I felt we made some great strides in terms of controls, responsiveness and even the visual improvements we got into it. We continue to evolve our games as we develop them, but we certainly don't target PC as something that's going to be significantly different. We aren't trying to create disparity in the experience that our gamers enjoy; we want to make sure everyone's having that same experience.

At our studio, we've always made console games. The biggest thing is we want to make sure the quality of the experience is consistent across all platforms so we don't have one userbase saying it's better on their system.

It may not sit well with every PC gamer how Visceral is handling the port of Dead Space 3, but at least there's an explanation about it. Dead Space 3 arrives on February 5, so we won't have long to go to find out how the PC port stands up.

Yet we're still the ones that play old games with crap graphics compared to today's standard. Oh yeah and If I spent 2-3x as much on a gaming pc than a console, I'd want better graphics and framrate than a console.

Yeah. EA didn't want to spend money on making a PC specific program for pushing their micro-transaction dlc. Specially since then they would expose their code, and maybe get in trouble with shoddy coding exposing people's credit card numbers and personal information.

So instead they're running a virtualisation of the xbox version. Which really is the PC version they would have on their development kits, just with horrible streaming pop (to allow for playing straight from disc with no install. And this pop-in still persists while the data is installed on an hdd of course, since the engine needs to account for constant streaming of new areas in 256Mb increments) and less shader-effects.

Locked config files, resolution, texture sizes and so on just comes naturally after that - because it really would mean extra work to restructure the streaming logic.

So EA thinks you're all chumps. That you'll buy anything. And they're presumably right, since they're even considering selling this.

-------------------"You're rhetoric is beyond the scope of any stable mind. "

*bleep* that, I'll just get it on consoles if at all. Might as well, if they want to use 6/7 year old hardware instead of taking advantage of more recent hardware, then I'll play it on 6/7 year old hardware instead of wasting my up to date gaming rig on this thing.

You're right, man. I just dropped $500+ on a new 4GB GTX 680 to enjoy this year's releases at their fullest potential, but now that I think about it, I would really rather not use it, especially if it helps Visceral cut a couple corners.

No.

-------------------I went to the place where every white face is an invitation to robbery. Sitting here in my safe European home, don't wanna go back there again.